For White Sox, It’s a Publicity Bo-Nanza

You telephone the office of the Chicago White Sox, who remain the Chicago White Sox because they threatened to become the St. Petersburg White Sox, but didn’t.

Had they become St. Petersburg, you wouldn’t be telephoning Chicago. Nor would you be telephoning the team at a new park it captured there.

A machine answers. If you are interested in season sales, the voice instructs you to press 1. If you are interested in individual game, press 2.

You are told to press 4 if you seek to contact one of the departments and 5 for the Silver and Black Club, the facility serving the elite.

OK, you want an executive? Press 3, which we do in search of Mr. Eddie Einhorn, an old acquaintance, who happens to be president of the White Sox.

Now the voice tells you: “Spell out the name of the party you are calling.”

Dutifully, we punch in E-D-D-I-E E-I-N-H-O-R-N.

The voice exhorts you: “Enter more letters.”

Offhand, we aren’t sure what further letters we are able to enter, considering we don’t know Eddie’s middle name. And if he should be, say, Eddie Einhorn III, how does one enter “III?”

To make a short story succinct, we tell the machine to do something that isn’t normal, and we hang up.

But you can see, at least, this has become an inventive organization, latest proof of which is, it finds a reason to sign Bo Jackson, rated medically in most quarters as bad news.

But the White Sox bag Bo and, confident what Eddie Einhorn would have told us if we were able to enter the proper number of letters into the touch-tone telephone, we pass this intelligence along.

Signing Bo is costing the Sox $700,000. You can say that is seven times more than Joe DiMaggio was paid, or you can say that is less than half the pay of Juan Samuel.

Now, how do you want to say it?

Linking today’s world to Samuel, you conclude Bo is costing nickels for (a) the exploitation he provides the Sox and (b) the outside chance he yet may play.

A few years back, Bo comes up for grabs in the NFL draft. Declaring for baseball, he has no takers, meaning the Raiders steal him on the seventh round.

For nothing more than a capital outlay--no squandering of high draft opportunities, no surrendering of players on their roster--the Raiders get a performer who gives them a respectable measure of service and mountains of publicity.

The White Sox study his case clinically. They ask themselves: “What can we lose on this deal but seven hundred thousand bucks? That’s less than you give a batter who hits .215.”

Bo assures the world he is going to recover. Banks, however, don’t always rate an athlete’s assurance as the best collateral.

But irrespective of whether he recovers, the White Sox already have seen their new uniform exhibited to the western hemisphere, thanks to Bo.

Bo can’t lose. He collected a sixth of his pay from Kansas City for getting fired. He is collecting from the Sox. And he must collect from football, because even if the Raiders don’t pay him, he has an insurance policy that will.

With such coverage, Brian Bozworth is collecting the balance of an $11-million contract.

Maybe Bo will play football. Doctors sometimes blow it. They once gave Carol Davis, wife of Al, only a 5% chance to return to normalcy after a heart attack and two-week coma.

She made it, leading Al to tell you he doesn’t want to hear about doctors’ odds. He expects Bo to be playing football for him again.

Even if Al is reporting from Disney World, you picture former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, wherever he now roams, shaking his head wondrously.

Bill says: “To get a few crumbs of attention for the club, I installed a shower for fans in the right-field corner. I gave away peanut butter, orchids, live turkeys. In the Saroyan play, ‘The Time Of Your Life,’ I saw an exploding pinball machine. This gives me the idea to install baseball’s first exploding scoreboard. I bust my back and, for 700 grand, the Sox today fall into all this air time and space.”

You want to ask Bill: “What would you have done with Bo?”

He could be expected to answer: “During the seventh-inning stretch, I would have shot him out of a cannon.”